Why Macron matters to world
By Andrew Hammond
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Thousands of “yellow vest” protesters took to French streets Saturday and Sunday for the eighth consecutive weekend of anti-government demonstrations. The continuing protests have badly weakened President Emmanuel Macron and one of the key political questions in 2019 is whether he can recover some of his former sky-high popularity.
The answer matters not just to France, but also Europe and the world at large, given that Macron has emerged as perhaps the most authoritative defender of the liberal international order in his short period in office.
Indeed, the French president alongside his U.S. counterpart Donald Trump currently embody more than any other democratic leaders the present “battle” in international relations between an apparently rising populist tide, and the center ground, which will continue to play out in 2019.
Macron's victory in 2017 against Trump's preferred far-right National Front candidate Marine Le Pen was so striking as it defied the march of populism in numerous countries which had seen parties of the center ground sometimes taking a political battering. Macron's win then appeared to represent at least a partial turnaround in fortunes ― in Europe at least ― for center ground politics.
From the perspective of French domestic politics, a critical question for Macron in 2019 will be whether the yellow vest protests have extinguished his program of economic reforms. These changes were thrown into doubt after the president announced in December that he has backtracked on a fuel tax hike and gave billions of pounds in aid to try to end the several weeks of protests.
In his New Year address, Macron asserted that the reforms will continue, and insisted his government “can do better” at improving the lives of citizens across the nation. Yet, many yellow vest protestors continue to be angry, and are calling for him to leave office.
This last weekend of demonstrations coincides with a poll released Friday showing 75 percent of the population are unhappy with the way Macron is running the country. The survey, for franceinfo and the Figaro newspaper, compares bleakly for Macron to one from April 2018 when “only” 59 percent of those surveyed were unhappy with the government, and that the top priority for the French populace is finding ways to boost consumer purchasing power.
The poll, and continuing protests, underlines the volatility of the political mood in France which, ironically, helped propel Macron's meteoric rise into power in 2017.
It was this similar anti-establishment political sentiment that put the country into uncharted territory by ensuring Macron's En Marche! party ― which was only founded in April 2016 ― could not just win the presidency, but also handsomely win the legislative ballots with one of the biggest majorities since former President Charles de Gaulle's 1968 landslide victory.
In this continuing volatile context, the outlook is highly uncertain for the remainder of Macron's presidency. Although a majority of voters decided to favor hope (Macron) over anger (Le Pen) in 2017, the tide could potentially now turn decisively against him if he fails to address the anti-establishment anger fuelled by economic pain which has seen the country suffer years of double digit unemployment and also low growth which pre-date his presidency.
Part of the challenge here for Macron, the youngest president in the six decade long French Fifth Republic, has been the very high initial expectations surrounding his presidency.
Here he will be acutely aware how early optimism during the last two presidencies of Nicholas Sarkozy and Francois Hollande fizzled away with both ultimately becoming unpopular one-term heads of state. Indeed, Hollande ― who became the least popular president since records began ― decided not to even seek re-election, the first incumbent not to try for a second term in the Fifth Republic.
The stakes in play are so high because, given voter discontent with the traditional political duopoly of center-right Republicans and center-left Socialists, if Macron fails with his political program, the primary beneficiaries of popular discontent with him may well be extreme anti-establishment figures, especially the leader of the far-right National Front Le Pen.
Although Macron comprehensively beat her in 2017, she nonetheless secured more than 40 percent of the vote and is young enough to run potentially in several more presidential elections.
To regain the political initiative in this context, and become a powerful contender for a second term of office, Macron needs to rebuild public confidence in his policy agenda.
During his election campaign, he showed that politicians of the center ground often benefit from having an optimistic, forward-looking vision for tackling complex, long-term policy challenges, like tackling stagnant living standards and re-engaging people with the political process, to help build public confidence around solutions to them.
Tackling such tough-to-solve, first-order challenges in this context is a significant hurdle that centrist politicians across much of the world are widely perceived to have failed on, helping give rise to perceptions of a broken political process.
To get back on the front foot, Macron will need to skillfully show again how a fair, tolerant, inclusive democratic politics can help overcome or ameliorate the challenges that many people are experiencing in a world changing fast in the face of globalization.
Andrew Hammond (andrewkorea@outlook.com) is an associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics.